Random rants, thoughts, reviews and braindumps from the Ranting Loon

Anime

Have you ever wondered what might happen if you mixed the dark Magical Girl feeling of Madoka with the madcap not-quite-hentai of Love Hina, stuffed that in a school and added a dash of 11eyes just for good measure? No? Neither had I, but the end result is still pretty good.

I give you Trinity Seven, an anime currently in season in Japan and being simulcast to America through Crunchyroll. It’s a quirky little anime that I find balances the darkness of the situation and setting with the hilarity of a guy with zero filter to his mouth and body. I don’t want to spoil things too much, but the show is worth at least a quick view. Continue reading →

So, real quick, wanted to pop in and fire off a bit about the series I just finished before it all drizzled out of my mind, so here’s the piping hot and super fresh review for you on Future Diary (Mirai Nikki for the Japanese purists), the anime. Try not to burn your mouth as it comes out the oven, eh?

So, ever wonder what might happen if Death Note and Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor had a mutant anime baby? No? Then you’re likely sane. But that’s ok, we’re gonna answer that question anyway: you’d get Mirai Nikki. The story follows poor wallflower Yukiteru “Yuki” Amano as he is drawn into a survival game using a diary that lets him see the future around him. Yeah, that part is basically taken straight from Demon Survivor, practically down to an early line along the lines of “Let’s Survive”. Granted, the trope is older than that, but still.

Episode one starts off confusing and brutal, and follows through with a scene change where the real plot gets to become unraveled. I love some of the dialog between Yuki and Deus, and I could write whole papers on the implications of the early conversations on later episodes and the ending itself, but that’s something for another time. Let’s just say that it opens itself up to a number of possibilities, and at least one of which is likely FAR more disturbing than the actual ending of the story.

Anyway, after a very fast paced opening, the show crawls itself on for a bit and all in all kinda reminds me of a sprinter trying to do a marathon. One moment, it surges forth with an alacrity that has you pinned to the seat, but the next minute we become so dialog heavy (with good exposition, don’t get me wrong) that you think about grabbing a soda to pass the time. Don’t get me wrong, you do yourself and the show an injustice to miss most any line as it builds on itself to much, but wow, exposition ho! Honestly though, the expositional parts are no worse than When The Cry (Higurashi no Naku Koro ni) or Death Note as it gives you bits of information and clues to start putting everything together. After all, despite the very intense fight scenes, at its core, Mirai Nikki is a horror/thriller instead of an action show, and it pulls it off pretty well.

One thing to admire for it is the number of times that things look one way and turn out another. I won’t spoil with examples, but yeah, show is great for setting an anticipation and then ripping your heart out, or giving a key role a sudden face heel turn when things look grim. Totally fitting to the characters once you start to learn their why too, which is another thing to really admire the writer for: these characters may be nuts (in most cases) but they’re still three dimensional, and trapped in one of the most horrible games imaginable. It adds a good flavor of humanity even to the most otherwise irredeemable characters, which makes the “everything is a shade of grey” theme all the more fitting.

In the end, though, I think it loses a lot of itself when it starts worrying more about causality and less about the interaction between Yuki and Yuno, but maybe that’s just me. There’s several points at the end where the expected (and practically spelled out) next event doesn’t happen, and I don’t mean because of the Future Diary changing itself. An epilogue (longer than the 5-second-a-group treatment anyway) would have been nice, though the show was already at 26 episodes, so that may have been a pacing issue, or simply having 27+ episodes worth of stuff and only 26 episodes greenlit, so I’ll overlook that, at least there was an attempt at closure outside the obvious.

All in all, while it has its moments that make you question your sanity, and the sanity of most, if not all, of the characters (or at least their reasoning ability, their sanity can hardly be questioned in most cases), it is definitely worth watching. Right now, the whole thing is free on Hulu (subtitled, if you care), so even more of a reason to scope it out. If I get some interest, maybe I’ll do a much more spoileriffic review and discussion, so if you’re interested in that, let me know.

So, if anyone was wondering: Shadowrun pretending to be D&D=boring, Shadowrun pretending to be Firefly=awesome.

Just got home from my weekly Shadowrun game, had a lot of fun mucking around with space time in an adaptation of one of the old modules. Not going to spoil anything, but lots of fun. Favorite joke of the day was when the BBEG who is pretending to be the good guy to the town (not a spoiler to the player, it gets revealed a long time ago to us) and he says something about how in the wild west, death and dealing with death is a normal thing. So I insinuated that I’d shoot him dead. I don’t have nearly enough dice to pull it off, so didn’t ICly try, but a lot of fun was had at the joke (I rolled for the hell of it, after saying it wasn’t an actual attempt, got a critical glitch, which really cemented that it was not meant to be). We couldn’t finish the current section of the module, so that’ll have to wait until next game. Oh well, still fun.

Game next week is canceled due to low player turnout, so those of us who are able to go will be playing Shadowrun Crossfire, once I have a game under my belt, I’m sure I’ll post up a bit more about that quirky little game.

In other news, was going to watch Big Hero 6, but that got delayed due to showtimes. Oh well, instead we plan on watching it on Tuesday, so look forward to a review then too, I guess. I’ve got episodes of Future Diary, as well as AVP2 and Predators to watch in the meantime though, so I’m a busy bee. Not sure what series to catch up on after I finish Future Diary though, debating between Sword Art Online (I’ve already seen the first season, looking forward to seeing the rest), Aria the Scarlet Ammo (because a friend reminded me that I never finished it) or finishing off Shiki. In retrospect, I have a lot of anime that I need to finish off. So little time, so much to read, see and do! ><

Enjoying the crap out of Future Diary, but that’s being earmarked for a review once I finish the series. In the meantime though, I give you this crack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqIX1tslWDw. Please forgive me for any brain meltage.

:( And it looks like my headphones are dead. Now to find my other pair. LOL They served me well for many years, but like all things, eventually they fade away and serve a function no longer. The funeral for my headphones will be held tomorrow and noon, nah, I’m just screwing with you of course, into the trash they go. Now I have to deal with these weird headphones that I got awhile ago because they work for the PS3, 360 and PC, but they’re not nearly as user friendly as one would hope. But meh, you get what you pay for, I suppose. Really, you’d think someone would have made a true wireless (as in no fob or anything) headset for the PS3 and 360 combined, and yes, I know that one is Bluetooth and the other isn’t, but still, wouldn’t that just mean that pairing is theoretically easier anyway?

Wonder how long it’ll take me to stop playing the song linked above. LOL It’s crazy catching to me for some reason.